Fin Keegan

SPEAKING TO “Time Out New York” recently, novelist Patrick McCabe made the point that the narrators of his novels tend to be Social Fantastics, that is, unreliable to a degree that allow a novelist to remain a Realist while, in the guise of depicted reality, including material drawn from the far shores of human possibility. Don Quixote is the greatest Social Fantastic in literature, though Cervantes affords us the company of the sceptical Sancho Panza–as most contemporary Social Fantasists do not–so as to play up the richly ironic contrasts between the “real” world (sheep; windmills) running alongside the hero’s fevered imaginings (knights; damsels)… Read MORE of my review of Alice Thompson’s Justine